Hello Hero is a typical free-to-play card battle game with RPG elements, but what makes this one stand out is the likable character designs. It’s been very popular overseas, and now it’s available in the US on iOS and Android devices (reviewed here on iPad).

You have five characters in your party, which can be interchanged later once you have more character cards. In the main game, you’ll go through various worlds with stages to tackle. In these stages, you’ll need to battle waves of monsters to reach the end. These battles are viewed in typical RPG fashion, with your characters on one side and the enemies on the other. Take turns trading blows with the enemies, but you really don’t have any control over your basic attacks. They just happen automatically. But each character has at least once special attack, like a more powerful hit, stat boosting spells, or healing. Tap on the icons on the lower right to initiate one of these skills, but you’ll have to wait for a while after using one to initialize another. You’ll want to make the most of these special skills, though, as they can be very useful.

After completing stages, you’ll earn money that can be spent to buy more items or cards in the shop. You may also earn equipment that can be used to boost stats of your character cards, or even new character cards themselves. Hello Hero places a big emphasis on these heroes, as their designs are very likable. There is even a bit of a ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ Pokemon mentality with this game as they tell you which cards you’ve collected in each area, and which ones you’re missing. Some of these cool characters include a singing cactus, cute succubus, playing card knight, cupcake warrior, and more! I wouldn’t mind seeing these heroes branch out to other kinds of games as well! When you collect new hero cards, you can add them to your party or combine them together to raise the level of one card, but you won’t be able to get the others back. There are also daily event challenges and you can battle other players online, too.

Hello Hero has a few minor problems, however. As a free-to-play game, you’ll have to deal with things like having to always be connected online to play, and your stamina goes down each time you battle, and you must wait for it to recharge before playing again. Although you can play quite a lot before that even happens, luckily. But that’s just the nature of the beast with these kinds of games. Also, I wish that you could’ve had more direct control over your characters in battle, but that’s just a personal preference of mine. And some of the gameplay rules are not explained as clearly, such as what cards can be combined to raise the level of other cards. But otherwise, Hello Hero is a cute little title, and if you like these kinds of games, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

Kid Factor:

While you do hit enemies with swords, spells, and other attacks, defeated characters just fall over and disappear. It’s no worse than Pokemon, really. Reading skill is a must, and light parental supervision is recommended for the online parts and micro-transactions.